Windows tagged news

AMD just announced the immediate availability of the Catalyst 13.6 Windows Driver. Highlights in this release include AMD GPU & AMD APU OpenCL 1.2 acceleration in Adobe Premiere PRO CC, product support for the new AMD A10, A8, A6, and A4 Series APUs on desktop and mobile platforms and AMD Enduro technology enhancements.

AMD CodeXL is a new unified developer tool suite that enables developers to harness the benefits of CPUs, GPUs and APUs. It includes powerful GPU debugging, comprehensive GPU and CPU profiling, and static OpenCL kernel analysis capabilities, enhancing accessibility for software developers to enter the era of heterogeneous computing. AMD CodeXL is available for free, both as a Visual Studio extension and a standalone user interface application for Windows and Linux.

AMD CodeXL increases developer productivity by helping them identify programming errors and performance issues in their application quickly and easily. Now developers can debug, profile and analyze their applications with a full system-wide view on AMD APU, GPU and CPUs.

AMD CodeXL user group (requires registration) allows users to interact with the CodeXL team, provide feedback, get support and participate in the beta surveys.

The Computing Language Utility (CLU) is a lightweight API designed to help programmers explore, learn, and rapidly prototype programs with OpenCL. This API reduces the complexity associated with initializing OpenCL devices, contexts, kernels and parameters, etc. while preserving the ability to drop down to the lower level OpenCL API at will when programmers wants to get their hands dirty. The CLU release includes an open source implementation along with documentation and samples that demonstrate how to use CLU in real applications. It has been tested on Windows 7 with Visual Studio. The original slide presentation from SIGGRAPH is available in the developer section on the Khronos website.

Intel has released Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications 2013 Beta. This Beta SDK allows OpenCL 1.2 API preview support on Intel CPUs mixed with the production OpenCL 1.1 support on the Intel HD Graphics. It also includes new tools such as a new kernel builder and GNU Debugger (GDB) support which ease the creation of OpenCL applications. This new beta SDK now supports Windows 8 and is compatible with the latest Intel HD Graphics driver for Windows 8

Valve Software has updated their Linux blog to report that the OpenGL version of Left 4 Dead 2 is now running fastest on Linux (315 fps). Surprisingly, given all the attention Valve has paid to Direct3D tuning over the years, even on Windows, the OpenGL version of the game now runs faster than Direct3D (304 fps vs. 270 fps) due to "overhead per batch in Direct3D which does not affect OpenGL on Windows".

Google announces ANGLE engine passes the rigorous OpenGL ES 2.0 test suite and has been certified as a compliant GL ES 2.0 implementation. Thanks to continued work from Transgaming, in collaboration with Google engineers and other contributors, ANGLE now allows OpenGL ES to be run on Windows without the need for OpenGL drivers. Firefox is already using ANGLE to render WebGL content on Windows. ANGLE is an open-source standalone library. "We hope WebGL developers and implementors will continue to join us in making ANGLE, and the open web platform, successful." said Vangelis Kokkevis, Software Engineer at Google.

Intel updated their Sandy Bridge drivers at IDF. Intel has refreshed its generic Sandy Bridge graphics driver to version 15.22.50.2509 for 32-bit Windows Vista and 7 and version 15.22.50.64.2209 for 64-bit Windows Vista and 7. some of the fixes include are WebGL rendering problems in Firefox and Chrome, and various OpenGL enhancements. Details are available on the online Intel PDF.

Opera just announced that its latest Opera 11 beta has WebGL support for Windows. Currently only Windows is support, but a promise of WebGL on Opera for other platforms has been made. As well, Opera claims they are working on WebGL for Windows using DirectX. This should be interesting, as WebGL is built on top of OpenGL. Opera 11 for Windows is available for download today.

The new version 0.9.5-R1 of the free open-source, cross-platform 3D application framework PixelLight has been released. OpenGL is used within the main renderer. Beside the usual bugfixing and feature completion, there are several migrations in this release. PixelLight is now using 'nullptr' introduced by C++0x, migrated from C style casts to C++ style casts and under MS Windows, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is now used as the main development IDE. There are also new features like the plugin SPARK_PL integrating the free open source particle engine SPARK. The SDK now includes two new demos, one of them shows how picking works.

Symbio today announced it has partnered with drawElements to enable next generation high-end graphics in Android and Windows Phone 7 Series smartphones. Symbio will provide services built on top of the recently launched drawElements Quality Program (dEQP) that puts OpenGL ES 2.0 drivers to the test.

AMD announced wide-ranging support of OpenGL 4.1 for Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux across select ATI FirePro", ATI FireGL" and AMD Radeon" graphics cards. The new functionality is made possible with the release of the latest professional and consumer graphics drivers, ATI FirePro" and ATI FireGL" unified driver 8.801, and AMD Catalyst" 10.12, available on the AMD website.

After months of work the new version of SIO2, the #1 game engine used by independent mobile game developers, is available for download. The core API has been rebuilt, and the engine is now available with many more features. The new version is twice as fast as the previous version, comes with a brand new SDK and comes with a FREE cross platform mobile game development tool chain allowing you to get started right away. Feature rich, extremely fast, flexible and scalable, SIO2 allows you to easily create professional 2D and 3D AAA game titles for your favorite mobile platform. Due to its unique core architecture, you get the opportunity to develop your mobile games on Mac OS X (XCode) and/or Windows (Visual C++). SIO2 is a cross platform state of the art 2D/3D game engine framework for mobile devices, that uses the power of OpenGL ES at its core to deliver lightning fast graphics.

The new Bullet 2.77 Physics SDK features OpenCL cloth simulation, contributed by AMD under the permissive ZLib license. The OpenCL implementation has been tested on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs for Windows and Linux as well as the Apple OpenCL implementation for GPUs on Mac OSX Snow Leopard. The full source code and precompiled Windows executable demos are available for download.